Saturday, February 7, 2009

dell precision m6400 power brick

I'm really happy with my new Dell precision M6400.
The only thing most people complain about is the size of the power brick, and I can't agree more. It's a huge 200 Watt thing and it's really as large and heavy as a stone brick.

Luckily I still have a spare power brick of my old Dell precision M65: a 90 Watt  PA-10 family power brick. It has exactly the same voltage (19.5 Volt) so I decided to try it.
I've been using it now for a few days when at customer sites and it works fine.

(Try at your own risk!)

3 comments:

chamanz said...

Thanks for this tip/idea (I could try with a M70)
I am considering the same laptop, as I landed here from planet.debian.org - can I ask you how went your debian install on it ?
and your working config (proc, fingerprint, raid/hdd) ?
and what is your average battery life ?
thanks in advance

Joost Yervante Damad said...

Hi,
I have the quadcore CPU, no fingerprint reader (fingerprints aren't safe, and it sits in the way when you use it without an external keyboard).
I bought it with one HD and added a second HD myself, because that was a lot cheaper.
I use RAID-0, linux software raid, 2x 320Gb 7200rpm disks.
Everything works fine, although I did need to upgrade to a 2.6.27 kernel to get bluetooth to work ( think I blogged about that before).
Joost

Joost Yervante Damad said...

A yeah, battery life is terrible. A little more then an hour. I didn't try to tune it yet as this is my desktop replacement.